


our cracking bones make noise

by watername



Category: Big Bang (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Cults, Cults, Dark, Dubious Consent, Gen, M/M, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-29
Updated: 2016-05-29
Packaged: 2018-07-10 22:00:17
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 5
Words: 16,326
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7009900
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/watername/pseuds/watername
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The man in red is a devil; the man in red is a god. (cult!au)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I finally write something longer than 3k, and it's a murder cult.
> 
> Please note the tags, as they are accurate af. Huuuuge thanks to CC, who is a midwife of writing demons.

He's a beautiful boy with the devil behind his eyes. He smiles and he giggles as purely as a child, and it is an art to watch people fall apart in hands: hands that are open in time to catch their pieces, to rework them to his liking. He puts his arms around them and holds them, the warmth of his breath prickling over skin, and the laughter folds naturally into a submissive peace.

 

As the evening rolls in, it's a gift to be his victim, the role changing seamlessly from passerby to listener to disciple to sacrifice. The pride in his eyes is unmistakable as he leads one and all to death. The last kiss he places on their cheeks is sweeter than candy.

 

Later, when their corpses litter the floor like unswept trash, and Seunghyun pulls out their innards with practiced ease, Seungri sighs. He wishes it could all just last a little bit longer.

 

But the devil in his eyes has the last say. And he says, as he always will, _Bring me more_.

 

* * *

 

Once, he saw a man all in red, from his hair to his shoes. The world faded at his presence; sounds dulled and silenced. It was a fever-dream, or so he thought – until he saw him the next day, the next week, the next month - until every slip in the corner of his eyes became him, only to disappear when he turned to face the apparition.

 

It was a tickle in his brain, a whisper in his ears, and it became a phantom caress against his skin as spring trailed on into summer. He started to shiver in his sleep even during the warmest of nights. He wondered if he was going crazy.

 

A lazy, amused whisper seeped into his body: _You're not crazy. You're meant for this._

 

"Meant for what?" Seungri demanded of the darkness.

 

The man in red stepped out of the shadows and settled into a crouch above him. _For me_ , his voice rung inside of Seungri's head, and he put his hand over his heart, and burned it to ashes.

 

 _Now go out_ , he demanded. Seungri shook as he looked inside of himself for something familiar, and found nothing.

 

* * *

 

 

The man in red is a devil; the man in red is a god. He is Seungri; he is Seunghyun. He is an overlay on every person Seungri lays eyes on, phantom fingers that hold their chests open for his words to reach in and make them tremble.

 

He loves more each and every time – he knows them more deeply than he ever would have before. There is a potential in each of them – the swelling of fantasies and fears is found inevitably behind even the dullest of faces - and it is a constant pleasure attained every night, their climax reached as he helps them become their fullest, as Seunghyun pierces them from belly to neck.

 

The calves will always need fattening before they are fit to eat.

 

* * *

 

 

The first task, the first day, was finding the butcher.

 

* * *

 

 

The man in red picked out Seunghyun, resting his hands on neatly starched lapels like a proud father. Seunghyun looked through the man just like everyone else, thick eyebrows knotted in concentration; Seungri saw nothing with his own eyes, but the coal where his heart once lived flared, and the man in red's smile grew and grew until it stretched his face thin.

 

 _Make him ours_ , he said, and he traced his words, unnoticed, against the shell of the taller man's ear - _Bring him home_.

 

Seungri burned at the sight.

 

He followed Seunghyun for days just to feel the painful warmth under his skin as he carefully memorized the lines of his jaw, the darkness of his eyes. During the nights he saw their future in shades of red and black. 

 

On the fifth day, there was no Seunghyun to trail after. Seungri's chest was as cold and empty as a tomb; a toneless buzzing filled his ears as he wandered the streets. He dug his fingernails into his palms and didn't notice the blood until it dripped onto his shoes.

 

He went back to the beginning, the alley where the man in red had drawn him in, and walked its length back and forth for hours, until the moon grew heavy in its light. He picked at the crescent wounds in his hands until they tore open again, and he held them out and watched the blood as it slowly, gently wept into a puddle at his feet.

 

His knees caught him as he fell, and next his hands as he bent at the waist, his forehead the last thing to touch the ground.

 

The blood was still swirling in the water, an eyeblink away from his skin. He wished he could sink into it.

 

Soundlessly, a heavy weight pressed against his neck. His cheek splashed into the puddle and he choked as the blood and water coursed into his mouth and down his throat.

 

The voice of the man in red was no longer lazy or amused - it was a throttling garrote. It did not seep into him as it did before; it pushed and wrenched and cracked his skull open until his vision went white and the only sensation left was the coppery grit still coating his tongue.

 

 _Ours_ , the man demanded. _Never yours_.

 

The blunt pressure against his neck increased and he couldn’t breathe, couldn’t see. He broke his fingernails against the gravel in a futile attempt to escape. The man's voice hammered him again.

 

Seungri's lips barely opened, the " _yes_ " he gave more shape than noise.

 

The pressure on his neck released, and he sputtered and breathed and clumsily got to his feet. Gravel had cut open his left cheek and embedded into his skin; pain shot through his entire body, but he could only look at the cold disappointment on the man in red's face for all pain to be forgotten in the shade of this new misery.

 

He stood in the glow of the moonlight and begged forgiveness, for wanting Seunghyun for himself, for seeing only the two of them in his fantasies.

 

 _Learn to share_ , the man in red scolded, and he stepped back into the shadows and out of the world.

 

* * *

 

 

The next time he saw Seunghyun, Seungri let him see him back. He crossed his arms, and refused to buckle as his gaze nailed him to the wall. Seconds and minutes, and in them an eternity, passed before Seunghyun winked.

 

The coal rose into his throat and flared so suddenly he could taste the ash in his mouth.

 

With nothing else offered, Seunghyun turned and walked away. Seungri watched him leave, frozen, as foreign laughter tumbled and scraped his insides.

 

 _Catch him_ , The laughter turned into a commandment _. For us_.

 

His hands pushed against the wall and he stumbled forward. Seunghyun rolled on, his head the prow around which the sea of people parted. Seungri pushed and pulled, collided and tripped, and, once he reached where he last saw that towering dark head, bitterness crested over him like a wave. He was gone.

 

He threw his hands behind his head and a sliver of a groan slipped out. A fearful ache deeper than winter drummed across him. He had failed, failed.

 

The man in red had no more laughter or command; he stayed silent at the corner of Seungri's eyes. There was nothing to be said that hadn't already been carved into his bones.

 

* * *

 

 _You need him_ , the man in red sang into Seungri as he sat in silence.

 

 _You can't do this alone_.

 

He slid his arms around Seungri in a phantom embrace, tilted his chin up and the man in red murmured across his lips:

 

 _You are only the beginning_.

 

* * *

 

 

 

That night he returned to the market where he had seen Seunghyun. He leaned against the wall as he did before, and thumbed a coin between his fingers. He closed his eyes, knowing their uselessness, and he waited.

 

The eternity of minutes and seconds passed before there was the smallest of noises to his right, a second of breathing, and he knew.

 

Seunghyun's voice pierced into him like a spear, a primal, dark noise that had him fisting his hands together before the sounds could be called words.

 

Seungri kept his eyes closed, and the man in red said, _Trust in me_.

 

He rolled his hips away from the wall and twisted to face Seunghyun. Visions of a bloody, ecstatic reality roiled into him as the man in red dropped the veil.

 

What was Seunghyun, beneath the skin and muscle, the blood and bone, unfolded in front of him, revealing itself with a sigh. It sang to Seungri of control, of power, of desires too black to be exposed but still cherished. It chorused to him a vision of his body ripped open and emptied out.

 

A hysterical giggle tore out, relief and understanding sank onto his shoulders, as he let himself see Seunghyun with his own eyes. The other man looked at him guardedly as he wiped the tears away.

 

"Let me watch," Seungri pled. Suspicion, replaced smoothly with disinterest, ran across Seunghyun's face.

 

"Watch what?"

 

Seungri leaned into him, as Seunghyun raised an eyebrow.

 

"Let me watch you kill them," he put his hands out in supplication. " _Please_."

 

His eyes darkened to a pitch beyond black and his grip around Seungri's wrist was bruising, but all Seungri felt was a plunging freefall into rightness as Seunghyun led him into the night.

 

* * *

 

 

 

Two hours later, he sat in a corner in a well-appointed, tasteful apartment, his arms bound behind his back. No protest had come out of him as he had been efficiently restrained, but Seunghyun had cast him a long, assessing look before leaving. He tapped his feet to the ground in an off-center beat as the clock ticked its way to the third hour. His muscles began to sore.

 

The man in red whispered, _Here he comes_.

 

A key turned in the lock, and the door opened, revealing Seunghyun, disheveled and with an intoxicated light in his eyes. His arms were wrapped as tight as steel around the limp body held to his chest. He drug it into the room and cast it onto the burnished wooden floor at Seungri's feet.

 

Her black hair spilled loose across his shoes.

 

Her eyes were half-lidded but for a moment they found his, and Seungri's breath caught in his throat at the thrill that bounded through his veins.

 

Seunghyun grabbed an exposed ankle and pulled her towards him as she softly sobbed.

 

"Please, please, _please_ ," she whimpered and looked up at Seungri again, as though he was a fellow victim. The purity of her desperation made him moan.

 

Seunghyun put a knee against her spine and yanked her head back, exposing the pale, perfect stripe of her neck and the simple gold-and-silver chain that adorned it. He took no moment to savor the useless squirm of her body against his heavier weight; there was no lurid display of anticipation.

 

There was only the blade he buried in her heart.

 

There was a clap of joy.

 

And Seunghyun looked up at the sound and saw first Seungri, bound body slack with pleasure, and then the man in red, whose smile was without reproach at the sight of his violent delights.

 

* * *

 

 

 

Before this – Seunghyun treated himself once a year, on cloudless nights, under a starry sky, baptizing his knife in some isolated village before driving back before the sun could rise. For the next half-year, he breathed easier.

 

But in the six months after that, he would suffocate. He would feel it in the morning, a gasp rattling out of him into wakefulness; at night, like something heavy was laid on his chest.

 

The weight would only grow as the days passed on, the story of his self-denial written across his body.

 

He would stare up at the ceiling; he would persist and practice restraint. He taught himself patience, playing out the sloppy mistakes of an over-eager hand, the momentary ecstasy followed by lifelong imprisonment.

 

He learned to find joy in anticipation. He filled the cup of his imagination to the brim with mayhem.

 

In the mornings, when he was woken up by heavy, trodding feet above, the frantic horns outside, he laid in bed and let himself swim in the silence he could create with only a few slit throats.

 

On quiet, peaceful nights where even the buzz of the city was muted, he would hear it filled with screams, created as he forewent his customary precise strokes, and instead doled out wounds where there was more pain than damage. 

 

He would smile politely at restaurants as he imagined grabbing the waiter by the back of the neck and caving his skull against the granite countertops. He would tip well, leaving money on a table he saw decorated with his blood and bone.

 

Release became an annual occasion, its portent when his hand began to make aborted motions towards an absent blade, when his eyes began to linger on imagined scars. He drew a long, unsteady finger across maps, until the streets began to disappear, and there was only one lonely route winding thinly into the country.

 

And so he survived, looking forward to an endless cycle of half-years, knowing that his fantasies were numbered, and there would come a day when his escape became a trap.

 

* * *

 

 

 

Now, Seunghyun sat on his heels and looked up where there were suddenly two men, when before there was only one. The lights seemed to dim as the man in red rubbed his hands together and settled onto his haunches, unabashedly stepping into the pool of blood. He looked into Seunghyun, who held the stained knife in one hand, and cradled a dead girl's head in the other.

 

The man in red reached out a hand and stroked her hair idly.

 

 _No need to hide_ , he said.

 

The foreign high that had engulfed Seunghyun, made him break away from his prized caution, urged him to find this girl in his own backyard, bring her to his home, and slaughter her where he slept, evaporated. A cold sense of dread dropped into his belly like a stone. The knife fell to the floor and splashed the hem of his pants in blood.

 

Distantly and obscenely close at the same time, the man in red stared into Seunghyun's eyes.

 

 _Nowhere to hide_ , he promised, and Seunghyun's knife plunged into his own heart.

 

He stayed upright, the man's hand holding one shoulder as the other loosely curled around the hilt. Seunghyun thought he should be sad, surprised, afraid; he thought he should even be angry at the irony; but he could only muster disappointment. Beyond his murderer's shoulder he could see the boy, still bound, now maddened, twisting as he struggled to get out.

 

The man in red had a small smile on his lips, and a welcome in his eyes; Seunghyun choked, and coughed up blood to rain on his face, and his smile only grew wider and more indulgent.

 

He began to lose the feeling in his limbs; there was no strength left in him as his body went limp, but the man in red refused to let him go. Instead, he pushed the hilt of the knife down, angling the blade up into Seunghyun's body, capturing it behind his ribs, and forcing him to remain where he was.

 

The last thing Seunghyun saw before his vision turned to black was the boy freeing himself, a frantic, desperate expression marring his face as he threw himself beside the pair.

 

He heard – _why_ –  

 

He heard – _trust in me_ –  

 

* * *

 

 

 

There was a voice in the darkness, and the voice asked, _Do you want to live?_

 

Seunghyun thought; his thoughts were of survival, of inevitability, of repression, of regimens of self-restraint.

 

He answered, _Not like this._

 

The voice was silent, and it asked, _Do you want to die?_

 

Seunghyun thought of a long life and answered, _Doesn't everyone?_

 

The voice hummed in pleasure.

 

The sound of it split Seunghyun in half.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> M/M is to come in later chapters, promise.
> 
> These are all to be held responsible:  
> http://gdragonhq.tumblr.com/post/140038924849/150612-made-tour-in-hong-kong-hq-number-g-l  
> http://sshinhye.tumblr.com/post/139730797467/as-my-story-came-to-a-close-i-realized-that-i-was  
> http://soo-hyuks.tumblr.com/post/125853014476


	2. Chapter 2

So the story goes – the ripest fruit, in time, becomes the most rotten.

* * *

 

 

In the days to come, there are dreams that spill out into the city like wine from a tipped bottle. They are meant for everyone and no one, with no single goal but bewildering its witnesses. Some are afraid, and exhaust themselves trying to forget; some yearn for the ephemeral nature, and run them over and over again until they wear thin. 

 

For two, though, there are different dreams, drawn from the same poisoned well. Their dreams will follow them; they will burrow into their waking moments, cocoon beneath their skin, and wait.

* * *

 

 

Youngbae will see himself running an endless race without a finish. Whether he stumbles or leaps, twists or slows – and he will do all of these and more – there will be no capture or escape. He will flee for an eternity, in a constant search for a shadowed and faceless hunter.

 

Worry will gnaw at him in each passing night that lengthens the duration of the course. He will pray: he will ask for guidance, and consolation, and peace. He will see his pursuer in the faces of his family and friends, and recoil.

 

His prayers will lose structure and clarity; they will slip from his lips with nothing but desperation to recommend them.

 

Sleep will call out to him in a singsong invitation back each night. It will promise him an ending, any ending. He will fall heavily, with only the small, stifled hope of surrender. His last thoughts before succumbing will rebuke his desires to be a coward.

 

He will enter his own dreams exhausted, running on already-ragged legs and blistered feet.

 

Frantic commands to his body, begging it to stop, will be useless, in this dream land that is at once rural and urban, crumbling and fertile. His feet will pound on pavement that becomes grass, sloping into a stream to be stumbled through before it climbs up to a sharp concrete grade. 

 

His foot will twist beneath him; he will pull it along mercilessly.

 

His bones will break slowly, inevitably, one by one. His ankle will snap in two, his knee collapse; he will fall down a mud-slick hill that ends in an alley. He will feel the sharp curve of his hip bruise and splinter.

 

He will drag on, and his hunter will watch, forever at the same distance.

 

Youngbae will wake in the morning and count the bloom of his bruises in the mirror.

* * *

 

 He wants to pray to god, but the devil hears him first.

* * *

 

 

In the last nights, he will no longer even run. He will crawl, inch by inch, rubbing his stomach raw against gravel. He will hear the sounds of his pursuer coming up behind him, he will feel the brush of a rough, calloused hand against his heel, but there will be nothing but his body's refusal to relent.

 

Blood will seep through his shirt and stain his sheets as he wakes, his body stretched out in an unfulfilled reach.

 

There will come the final night where he runs and runs, but there is a tunnel calling and repulsing him in the same measure, and from it, a man will emerge, all in red.

 

Youngbae will stop.

 

The man in red will smile at him. Gratitude will flood Youngbae's senses, pushing him to his knees. He will flutter his eyelids shut as the man runs a cold, fond hand through his sweat-soaked hair.

 

He will kneel down until they are at eye level with each other.

 

The man in red will say – _Don't look behind you_ – even as the sharpness rakes down his back.

 

The next morning, there will be long, brutal claw marks scarring him from shoulder to hip.

* * *

 

Across the city, a bright boy with a face meant for joy will find foreign blood caked beneath short, neat fingernails.

 

Daesung, too, will be full of prayers, and they, too, will be plucked from the air, diverted from their original course.

* * *

 

 

Daesung walks the streets and feels, in the caverns of his heart, that those passing can see the clench of his hands and how they are masking skin rubbed raw and pink. Even as he remembers the blood washing away, he knows his hands aren't clean.

 

His smiles are perfect and false, and he strains himself not imagining who he's hurt, who he has left his mark on so painfully.

 

There's a long-healed scar on the man who sells him his lunch, and he nearly vomits as he pictures his own familiar, gentle fingers ripping into him, the skin peeling away like the rind of an old fruit.

 

He ducks into a nearby alley, and swallows at too-thick air. He bends to put his head between his legs, and his hair blinds him as he sucks in air shallowly, needfully. He rubs his hands up and down his trembling legs and tries, fails, to erase the image.

 

His heart beats too rapidly in a pitter-patter step. It only skids to a stop when someone above him lets out a giggle.

 

The source is a beautiful boy, dark-eyed and head cocked in curiosity, and there's something like forgiveness in his eyes as his hands clap around Daesung's shoulders and rub them comfortingly. He feels his heart swell and slow, like it's trying to keep time to a new, unfamiliar rhythm that it wants desperately to learn.

 

"Tell me," the boy says, and it's like a hook has been dropped into Daesung's throat to draw out all of his words.

 

He talks.

 

He speaks of the dreams that now wrack him, how at first they brought him comfort. He describes a flat horizon that beckoned him into a wild freedom he's never been comfortable with before, challenging him to outpace the wind. There was nothing holding him back, his mind empty, his body unlimited.

 

Reticence slows him, guillotines his words apart into stutters as he mentions the blood beneath his nails, and the boy's attention immediately goes to where he's stowed his hands in his pockets.

 

The boy says, "Let me see," but even before he can finish speaking he's circled Daesung's wrists and pulled them lovingly out. There's nothing left to see, but still the boy admires and turns them over, exposed up to the sky.

 

The boy hums a psalm as he traces a sharp fingernail across the lines of his palms, and then abruptly drops his hold.

 

A sudden, bitter cold floods Daesung's lungs, and the line of confession waiting on the end of his tongue seizes and disappears into nothing. He feels – _empty_.

 

The boy stares through him, as though he is cataloguing and appraising everything inside of Daesung. He feels, as though in a distant echo, that he wants to be found satisfactory; that, if he left this boy, there would be a rattling-bones chorus of regret for the rest of his days.

 

In an unseen moment, the appraisal stops, and the boy finds his eyes again. His lips curve, unrestrained, into a pleased smile. A heavy wave of inexplicable relief crashes over Daesung.

 

The boy speaks into him; he pricks and pulls and sears away until all of Daesung is laid out like a feast, until he is drawn and quartered. The boy surveys his hopes, one by one, and caresses them with nurturing words. He makes them flourish until they have grown into something wild and beautiful.

 

The sun drops out of the sky as Daesung is swallowed up whole by the promise of his voice.

 

A kind, guiding hand takes his and leads him in a criss-cross path of foreign streets. The streetlights are few and far between, and each light sparks into darkness as Daesung and the boy pass beneath, but there's no room for concern in him. They walk in silence; he can still feel the boy's words roping around his heart like serpents.

 

(Reluctant and exhausted, miles away, Youngbae's heart feels swollen and tight in his chest.)

 

They come to a stop in front of an unmarked door; the boy places his hand at the small of Daesung's back as he opens it for him, graceful and gracious, and nods him inside. He crosses under the threshold without hesitation, and the door closes behind him.

 

He processes a cavernous emptiness, the lights sparse, before the boy continues on, and he follows faithfully as the walkway curves down. There's a tight line across the boy's shoulders that wasn't there before, and the curiosity that's been sedated in Daesung for hours weakly stirs.

 

"Here we are," the boy says, turning sharply. His expression softens as he looks as Daesung; there's compassion and understanding and love in the angles of his face, and he steps towards him. The serpents around his heart constrict, and he closes his eyes as the boy leans forward to brush a chaste, sweet kiss against his cheek.

 

The phantom brand of the boy's lips burns against Daesung's skin as he teeters back on his heels. There is an enormous, leering silence in the darkness behind him, and from them a pair of solid hands catch at this lifeless arms and pin them behind his back.

 

He looks to the boy, fear dissolving the last of the fantasy, and finds his expression is not one of delight, disgust, or even shame, but of confusion. He's not looking at Daesung or the figure holding him rigid and restrained; his gaze is starred and dreamy, and is looking beyond this world.

 

When his eyes re-focus on Daesung without warning, a small cry escapes him, seeing that they are now filled with an eager resolve. The boy's steps echo as he crosses the room, and the figure begins to drag Daesung backwards at the same clip. He scrambles against the floor with no consequence.

 

He begins to scream, for help, for mercy, but he's pulled along like an errant child throwing a tantrum.

 

By the time they stop, his throat has gone hoarse. The surroundings are claustrophobic, sallow, and oven-warm.

 

The hands that held him, with fingers that bruised him, release and their owner steps around to face Daesung and watch dispassionately as he pushes himself back and back until his back is flush with the wall.

 

He gathers the meager remains of his courage and shoves the words out, "What do you want?"

 

There's an aristocratic, dismissive beauty in the man's face, highlighted by the bubbling eagerness of the youth beside him. They both look down at Daesung consideringly, and he swallows a hard lump of fear as the man reaches out to cup his chin in one heavy, pale hand.

 

The man says, with a curl of his lips that is nothing like a smile – " _Everything_."

 

(Youngbae curls in his bed, fearing and anticipating what his dreams will bring - the man he fell to his knees for, or the unseen that gouged him.)

* * *

 

Daesung sees the man in red on the second day, sitting patiently across from him as he stirs from a dreamless sleep.

 

He is pristine from his head to his toes.

 

(Free of his dreams for a night, unconsciously and reverently, Youngbae touches the scar that vines over his shoulder. He pinches the new skin there a translucent white and winces, grateful at the very real pain it produces.)

 

Daesung folds his arms for warmth, and bows his own head to his knees, and refuses to entertain his own hallucinations.

* * *

 

His dreams are no longer exultant, freeing. He sits, unencumbered, in a wide field, but his heart tells him there's no point, that he's trapped even when he can't understand how. The horizon beckons as he looks across the sea of grass longingly, the endless vista a cruel temptation.

 

The man in red sits beside him and extends his legs and arms, throws his neck back. He lies down and looks up to the sun unblinkingly. He sighs in contentment and turns to look at Daesung, who has dug his fingers against the grass, as he tries to push himself up.

 

 _Keep trying_ , he says, and he disappears as Daesung wakes up to his own fingernails broken against the floor.

* * *

 

On the third day, he finally looks the man in red in the eyes, finds him as unmoved as he always is, legs crossed neatly in front of him.

 

He studies him in the half-light, trying to reconcile his hallucination with his imagination, to find his origin in his memories. There's something in the crook of his neck, in the tilt of his lips, that scrabbles at the back of Daesung's palms like an itch.  

 

(Youngbae needs to remember the pain, as the details and scar begin to fade. He needs to know it's not a miracle to be followed out of his dreams by bruises and blood.)

* * *

 

That Daesung wakes up on the fifth day is a disappointment, and a surprise. His hunger and thirst have become a constant hum in his body, greeting him as he fitfully sleeps and wakes.

 

Neither the boy nor the man have come to see him, even in the few moments where there's the noise of movement beyond the walls. His few attempts to speak out reverberated around the room until they faded into silence.

 

He nods at the man in red as he pushes himself up by the heels of his hands, winces as the tips of his fingers compress against the ragged edges of what's left of his nails.

 

The man hasn't left his side since the third day: there when Daesung opens his eyes, and there when he closes them, and in the spaces inbetween.

 

He's only ever spoken to Daesung in his dreams, voicing encouragement and reassurance as he lies in that open field, held down by the invisible grip of the sky. In the room, his fingers stroke through Daesung's hair in silence as he rests his head against the wall.

 

He only knows he's fallen asleep when he opens his eyes and starlight shines down on him.

 

The man in red leans over him, blocking out the stars with a toothy, trickster smile, and extends his hand.

 

 _Time to go_ , he says.

 

(A shutter-quick image of the man in red appears to Youngbae. The feeling that had brought him to his knees tugs at him, stronger than gravity.)

 

It's as clear a trick as anything, but Daesung moves to get up. He expects the push, the press, that always stops him, but he's pulled up without strain.

 

He takes a long, deep breath, feels invigorated and alive and free. There's energy rattling his legs, begging to be used, and he spins a circle, indulging in all the open paths that lay before him.

 

 _Anywhere_ , the man in red cajoles him, but his fingers curl like manacles around his arm.

 

Hard comes the realization that it's only a dream, a spike lancing his heart, and he opens his eyes to find concrete built over the horizon.

 

Dreams end.

 

The man in red sits across from him in silence, and the walls loom high and thick above them.

* * *

 

The boy visits Daesung as he lies on his back, insensate, on the seventh day. He places a wet towel between his dry, cracked lips and hums, his eyes dark with concern.

 

The man in red clicks his tongue, sharp, against the back of his teeth, and holds out an impatient hand.

 

The knife is inexpert in the boy's grip; its edge is dulled and dim.

 

Daesung never opens his eyes, but he hears the soft lullaby and thinks he must be home as the tip of the knife is pushed with inhuman strength so that it pierces his skin and traces his arm, loops his back, and slides in consecrating curves across the paper of his skin.

 

(Youngbae no longer aches, and the tendrils reaching over his shoulder are nearly invisible. He tries to push down on the perverse sense of regret and loss pooling in his stomach, but it only spreads out more, spilling into his limbs.)

 

The boy removes a bottle from his coat, opens it, dips his fingers in; he pulls them away washed in black. He slides his touch along the winding path where the cuts are warm and open. The man in red picks up the lullaby with strange words older than the earth, his hand hot and bloody against Daesung's forehead.

 

The words seep into the cuts and barb beneath his skin.

 

In his dreams, Daesung at last runs for the horizon, with a feral, ancient urge unfurling in his belly. 

* * *

 

It has been a week of undisturbed nights when Youngbae finds himself flat on his back, looking up at the man in red, his head angled in derision, and when he speaks, it is sharp slate against the trembling bob of Youngbae's throat.

 

_Why come back?_

 

Youngbae puts his elbows against the ground and prepares to stand, but the man raises his foot to place it squarely on his chest. Precisely, he digs his heel in and leans down to grab him by the hair.

 

At his back, off in the immeasurable distance, he hears the pounding of feet against the ground like a drumbeat.

 

The man in red tightens his grip and matches the rhythm with his foot, each beat heavier than the last as he commands,

 

 _Tell me_.

 

Youngbae's lips part to give an answer, but can only produce nothing. He cannot make sense for what has brought him back, why relief rings in him like church bells to find himself back here, where he was defaced, where he is hunted, even now as the drumbeat quickens.

 

The eyes of the man in red are hard and demand too much of Youngbae.

 

A wordless truth strums a chord across his limbs as each moment passes held in his eyes, and it is in perfect harmony with the incessant, encroaching beat. It calls for him to be stripped bare, sacrificed to the melody for its completion.

 

Youngbae lets himself go slack, his head only held up by the man's brutal grasp, and allows himself to be crushed underneath his bootheel. 

 

The man in red kneels down beside his pliant body; the touch of his hand turns sweet, while his palm is cracked over with dried blood that flakes like snow in Youngbae's hair.

 

(There's a primal howl roaring in Daesung's ears, louder than the wind he outraces, deep and dark and unknowable, and it's getting louder.)

 

The man in red lies down beside him and turns his face towards his. He reaches down and rests his stained hand on Youngbae's naked shoulder, pushes his thumb against the pink lines there.

 

 _Because I answered you_ \- he fills in what Youngbae struggled to realize, and the weight of his tar-black voice crushes Youngbae into the dust.

* * *

 

If Daesung stopped, he would have heard voices in the roar.

 

If Daesung stopped, he would have felt the blood anointing his back.

 

If Daesung stopped, he would have known that he was hunting.

 

 _If_ – he would have spared his prey.

 

He breeches over a featureless hill, and looks down at the man in red at the mouth of the tunnel, and the prone body beside him.

 

A growl lunges up his throat.

* * *

 

 _There's nothing to fear_ , the man in red says. _Don't look behind you_.

 

Youngbae closes his eyes and waits.

* * *

 Daesung knows the work of his hands.

 

There's something wrong with the body beside the man - a knowledge with no origin in rational thought - but the old confusion, the old terror of death, has evaporated. There is a new, overpowering heat methodically scouring his insides clean.

 

The man in red whistles, low and beckoning, and it stops the wild thrum of his heart in its tracks. Daesung bows his head as he approaches.

 

 _You found what you were looking for_ , the man says.

 

Daesung doesn't know who the body is, but he lifts his hand and puts it against his back. He matches the width of his fingernails with the shallow lines.

 

He feels the distant memory of revulsion, as though someone else was telling him a long-forgotten story.

 

His fingers curl into points as they slowly re-trace the path. The body shudders beneath his touch, and a vicious urge snaps in him like a live wire.

 

He wants to tear everything to pieces.

 

Youngbae screams when Daesung starts with him.

* * *

 

His skin is torn away, strip by strip, his muscles lay shredded, and are cast aside. His bones are broken into shards.

 

There's blood caked beneath Daesung's short, neat fingernails.

 

The man in red lifts his hands up to examine them under half-closed eyelids. He hums in approval as Daesung blinks slowly and his shoulders sag - he is sated and gorged for the first time on violence. The man pushes back on his shoulders until he's lying flat, pats his cheek kindly.  Above him the stars blink in complacence at his conversion.

 

The man in red gathers up the meat and bone that once was Youngbae.

 

He hums the melody and makes him anew.

* * *

 

 _Here_ , there was mercy and kindness.

 

The man in red throws these to the side.

 

 _Here_ , humility.

 

The man in red pulverizes it between his fingers without a pause.

 

 _Here_ , love.

 

This the man in red contemplates, knitting his brows together. This he plumbs the depth and breadth of in a long, unbroken gaze, finding it rich and fruitful.

 

 _This_ he can use.

 

He twists Youngbae's heart, wrings out its weight like a towel until family and friends bleed out, and it's left collapsed, small, and frail. Daesung watches the wind threaten to pick it up as it shudders.

 

The man in red holds the heart cupped in his hands and breathes himself into it, swelling it obscenely large. It exceeds what it was before, but it is dark and jealous. The wind howls and careens, but the heart and its love lie heavy and unmoved.

 

There is no room left for anything but the man in red.

* * *

 

In the beginning, there was one. And he wanted more.

 

He gave an alley boy a beauty and charm to lure and beguile; he pulled a man out of suffering and set him into liberation; he let a boy in chains destroy his prison; he gave a pleading man a god who would answer him.

 

Now, he will burn the city in their light.

 

Now, there are five.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> An important piece of art: http://daesungindistress.tumblr.com/post/138972960187/monster-daesung at fault


	3. Chapter 3

Here is the oldest lie: the man in red is meant to be alone.

* * *

 

 

There is no mysticism that requires him to pull four men out of the garden of humanity and cultivate them to his liking, re-planted in his own soil and fertilized with his own teaching. There is no outer demand that reasserts with every century, that a new quartet be selected for usage.

 

And yet, he does.

 

What they were meant to be to him, at the beginning, is practical - tools to be set to the whetstone as he decides. As such they can be put to work jointly, compensating for the other's shortcoming. Where one cuts, the other twists; where one twists, the other tears.

 

What they have become is a habit he cannot kick, beautiful and addictive, and they pull like a riptide.

* * *

 

 

Here is the oldest truth: the man in red is a craven, needful and lonely.

* * *

 

 

When he sees the disparity between what was meant to be and what is, he tells himself it would be an unfathomable cruelty, to be a creator who takes no pleasure in his creations.

* * *

 

 

Sometimes it isn't Seunghyun waiting for Seungri in the darkness, a long shadow waiting until the light is the brightest to snuff it out.

 

Sometimes, it's Youngbae, whose own light is so lovely no one realizes they are burning at his touch.

 

Sometimes, it's Daesung, who has little patience and too much strength, the scent frenzying his blood hours before they are brought to the slaughter.

 

Sometimes, it is only Seungri, and they fall against him as he sways with them for hours. His voice goes raspy with earnest promises and temptations, and their passing is quiet and painless and resigned, like falling asleep.

 

Sometimes, it is all four, wrecking and ravishing and rewarding in equal measure, and the man in red is heady and drunk on it all.

* * *

 

 

They spread out into the city, like spokes on a wheel, of which the man in red is the center. They are a part of him, and together they create the new balance, as the orbit of the world stretches thin each day under their care.

 

The man in red tracks his toe in day-old blood, and looks for how their heartbeats provide the rhythm to the melody he has been humming for centuries.

 

From one of the heartbeats, there is a quiet dissonance; the man in red wants to ignore it. It is small and infrequent, and it does not wreck the melody. He wants to dedicate himself to drinking in indulgence, again and again, until it becomes marrow. But dissonance will grow, unfettered, if he lets it. Dissonance is a threat that sees him eyeing an oblivion of his own making.

* * *

 

 

He finds Seunghyun, who looks no different, elegant and handsome, but that was only ever a shell, and now a cracked one at that, stitched back together and straining at holding in a consumptive, hungry need.

 

He skins an apple, looking like he's forgotten that not everything will beg when you cut them.

 

The man leans against the table, and pulls Seunghyun apart at the seams, ignoring how his knife trembles and slides across his hand.

 

(It's of little consequence and no harm - Seunghyun has no blood of his own to spill anymore.)

 

 _What are you hiding?_ \- the man murmurs.

 

“Nothing,” Seunghyun responds. His hand wraps tightly around the blade of his knife, the apple forgotten beside it in half-ribbons.

 

The man in red scoffs, but there is little to uncover. He promised there would be no more hiding, and he fulfilled his oath. The shell protecting the world from Seunghyun is thin and near-transparent. He kills because he is a killer. Anything more than that was uselessly philosophical.

 

He leaves, and with a twist of his fingers presses the ragged seams of the shell back together. The last image that squeezes out of Seunghyun and into the man is the kindly vendor in the next stall, peeled into his own scarlet and pink half-ribbons.

 

The man in red puts his hand over Seunghyun's in apology and moves on.

* * *

 

 

Daesung is bloodied and alone, always. His mind is a whirlpool of screams and echoes, the real and the imagined and the soon-to-be.

 

It is a simple, easy matter to be pulled under the surface and crushed, but the man in red wove the maelstrom into being, and holds no fear of it.

 

He puts his hands against the black ink decorating Daesung's naked, trembling back. There is an urge to run rattling under the skin, and it is only fearfully leashed at his touch.

 

Daesung's voice is roughened and stumbles like a blind man on an unknown path. He can feel the man in red standing on the shores of his mind, watching him struggle, but he persists in speaking between cracked lips, as no one else has ever listened.

 

"What are you doing?"

 

The man clicks his tongue at him disapprovingly.

 

_You know._

 

Daesung's laughter echoes like a jagged canyon with high, inescapable walls.

 

"You've never said it."

 

The man leans against him, presses his fingers where the ink has curved like a boomerang across his shoulderblades. His breath is gunpowder, burning words across his skin.

 

_But you know._

 

There is calm and quiet in the center of the storm, and here the man expects to find the source of that dissonant note, but there is nothing but resignation.

 

"I know."

 

The man in red stays with him and watches how the storm consumes him once more, inevitable and eternal.

* * *

 

 

He looks to Seungri and finds ghosts in his long and unforgiving memory, of boys just as ambitious, just as lovely. He is only the latest in a spider-web thread through history that is beaded with disappointments.

 

Some found their butcher, only for their words to fail and their body to be strung up like so many lights. Some broke at the knowledge he gifted them with, and were left to babble in madhouses.

 

He has moved on relentlessly through the ages, gibbering echoes still in his ears as he finds the next bright-eyed boy, makes his home in the corner of their vision until they call out to him in want.

 

The latest is sleeping, unmindful, bathed in thick daylight, his arm thrown across his eyes as he splays out like a child. The man in red sits down beside him and watches how Seungri twists his body towards him like a flower towards the sun.

 

He is far more gentle with him than he was with Seunghyun, as he twines their fingers together. Where Seungri's palms once split during a lonely and terrible night, there is still a dull ache and there the man in red can enter, the jungle of his mind cleared by tangible regret.

 

Seungri's oldest memories belong to dark-eyed and sweet child who burned to ash months ago. The man in red moves on and rifles through Seungri as he is now, a marvelous gleam in the night, a honeyed poison.

 

Here is that discordant sound, so plainly obvious: it had begun with Seunghyun, with a nascent possessiveness that the man in red believed he had broken.

 

 _Ours, not yours_ , he had said, and his beautiful boy sequestered his ambitious, selfish dreams of red and black in the corner of his mind. But it has been fed, not starved, for where there was once only Seunghyun, now there is Youngbae and Daesung as well.

 

It wanted more.

 

The man in red knows the feeling. 

* * *

 

 

He is disappointed, and memory supplies him with face after face of those before, the ones who didn't break with knowledge, who didn't become a victim to would-be allies, but who instead got so far, only to choke on their own pride. 

 

The weight and future of these four battered souls roll across the palm of the man in red like marbles.

 

There is a heaviness to all of them, as they are saturated with Seungri's greed, and now, here, the angle is too steep for the man in red to fight; all of his work will tumble into that familiar oblivion of failure.

 

He is so consumed with these thoughts, the inevitable end, the spiral of cumulative beauty cut short once again, that he almost misses how the shadows of Seungri's mind is still trying to keep one more secret, one more hidden jealousy.

 

It gleams with a cold light, tinted scarlet, another soul battered with time, and it says to the man in red, loud as a choir –

 

_I am not meant to be alone._

 

The darkness surrounding the man in red is pulling back - Seungri is rousing into wakefulness - and he lets his hand fall open, lets all of these return to their hiding place.

 

The thought of being wanted like a human rolling across the tip of his tongue like ice, he goes to where is he always welcomed, just as he is.

* * *

 

 

If Seunghyun is a line of frost that clinches the length of his body in its grasp; if Daesung is a warm, coppery flood that drowns the well of his throat; if Seungri is a tide that pulls and pushes constantly at the shore of his heart –

 

then Youngbae is a fever.

* * *

 

 

The sun is high and bare in the sky, and scorching those unlucky enough to be caught outside. Their feet are as heavy as their hearts, but Youngbae is unbowed and unbroken.

 

The man in red leans against the wall, tilts his head, and watches as Youngbae stops to make a girl wilting at the corner flush at the force of a smile that promises everything and nothing.

 

By now it's a rehearsed scene, but the man in red looks at it in a new light, with a small, insistent curiosity that wants to know if this display is what has fed Seungri's ambitions and greed, if this is what his squirreled away dreams comprise of – himself, in the place of that girl, supine and stupid on her back as Youngbae sucks bruises into her skin and lies to her about love.

 

He hopes not. They are all intoxicated on the same fantasies. Seungri has spoon-fed them to his own, lured and lulled and laid down at the altar.

 

The sun is at its apex.

 

Youngbae is burying himself into this girl, only half-hidden in a shadowed alcove. Her head is thrown back, expression slack with pleasure as his mouth presses against her neck. His hands grip at her hip and leave blisters shining and red. She's heedless and in love. 

 

When she dies, her lips are trying to form a name Youngbae never gave.

* * *

 

 

The man in red is Youngbae's unseen and curious shadow, growing longer as the day stretches and begins its slow fall into night. Each angle of the sun's descent is marked with a new man, a new woman, falling in love. Their affairs are bright and brilliant and doomed. 

 

The sun dips beneath the horizon, and the stars dimple the sky as he trails Youngbae down an empty street.

 

When he meets his pace, unsheathes himself from the night, a desire like electricity jumps across Youngbae's skin, and its crooked branches bend to the man in red in want.

 

Others burn for Youngbae, but Youngbae burns for the man in red, and no one else.

 

The man puts his hands against Youngbae's cheeks, his fever drains out of him in jagged shudders. His stubble grazes against smooth palms, and his fingers grab onto the man's jacket as his entire body bows and breaks.

 

The man in red hums the melody against Youngbae's mouth and feels the song coat his heart, thick as syrup.

 

Youngbae pushes forward and presses his dry lips against the man in red's. The nourishment it gives him has him keen, high and wanting.

 

The man in red lets him, runs his cool fingtertips through his hair as Youngbae soothes himself on his touch, tracing the hollow of his throat and licking salt off of his collarbone. A whine rises in the back of Youngbae's throat as his entire weight rests against the man's, his hands holding him tight at the hips.

 

Every inch of him feels like an open flame.

 

An alcove will host neither of them – there is no secrecy in Youngbae as he drops to his knees and nuzzles his head against the man's legs. Sweat drips along the back of his neck as the man pushes his hair out of his face and searches his eyes.

 

He finds –

 

Youngbae needs the man in red, but he does not covet him.

 

He yearns and he desires, but he never takes.

 

He puts himself at the man's feet and waits for salvation.

 

Only when the man in red breaks his gaze and allows, with a tacit nod, does Youngbae swallow him up to slake his thirst.

* * *

 

 

He catalogues the days and nights that follow in repetition.

 

In the day, he thinks –

 

– of Youngbae's swollen, contaminated heart and how it would burst in his chest.

 

In the afternoon, he thinks -

 

– of Daesung, his restraint in a drought, exhausted and running until he collapses and his destruction has nowhere to go but inside, and how he would break himself apart in halves, in quarters, in eighths.

 

In the night, he thinks -

 

– of Seunghyun, his edges carved off, padded into suffocating dullness.

 

As each morning breaks he knows he is necessary.

 

But on the last day and afternoon and night his thoughts break the path.

 

He thinks –

 

– of Seungri, adrift;

 

– how, if he were to disappear, he would be mourned.

* * *

 

 

The man in red is needy and lonely and powerful.

 

He knows what it is to be needed.

 

He does not know what it is to be wanted.

* * *

 

 

When he returns, his mind still pondering over this wholly new sensation, Seunghyun is as he never expected to find him, with clean, unbloodied hands.

 

The stars were his only company the night before. He has wiped no blood across his brow. He wears his distress blunt as a club, restlessness dots his neck with sweat, and he demands an accounting from Seungri and Youngbae. His blade gleams clean and alien.

 

No explanation would ever be good enough for Seunghyun, after he had been promised so much, and Seungri wears a necklace of purple and blue bruises from trying to explain.

 

The city is rousing, after sustaining a thousand cuts in its sleep. It has begun to sense the predators in its midst. For the first time in months there are no more crowds, no hustle and bustle in the streets.

 

There is instead a herd, bound together by a compelling animal paranoia.

 

Seungri, coughing, bent in half at the waist, believes he is a man unaccustomed to failure. The man in red feels that belief curl in on itself in defense, as Seungri reverts before his eyes to a boy with loss marked across his skin. He struggles to regain his sense of power, of destiny.

 

 _It is good_ , says the man in red, chasing away the doubt and fear and anger that's permeated the room.

* * *

 

 

It is good.

* * *

 

 

When the man in red last accomplished so much is from a time older than the stones used to build a city now sagging with age.

 

Ancient goals, half-forgotten in the cobwebs, are being unearthed in him.

 

In his long history, he has tried and he has tried and he has failed. With failure the stage is reset, the players re-cast, and the lines grow stale with each recital.

 

But now – _this_ – the remembrance of what it was to succeed, it ignites the kerosene of his blood. 

 

After his assurances, he pushes Seungri and Youngbae out into the streets. They trail the pack as the man in red feels incineration dancing at his fingertips. 

 

They try, over and over again, fail again, to unravel the fresh twine of paranoia looping around everyone's hearts. Queasy fear leaks out of each. It takes ever-sweeter words and touches to free them for the slaughter.

 

He leaves Youngbae trying to catch nervous eyes trying to ignore him, and follows Seungri, whose shaking hands reverberate in tune with his would-be victim.

 

The man in red pours everything he has into this exposure, cracks open his ribcage, gifts his ambitious boy in blood and bone and want and need, and if he didn't know before, he knows now the flash in Seungri's eyes is pride in him.

 

Seungri's hands are still as they find their place, cupping a quivering heart slowing and swelling under his ministrations.

 

They move on, and cull the herd skillfully, and each one earns the man in red another glance weighted in selfish affection, perching between his shoulderblades like a stone.

 

The dissonant note shrieks louder and louder in his ears, but he cannot bring himself to silence it. He pushes himself to the others, looks for the same jealous light in Daesung, Seunghyun, and Youngbae.

 

When he cannot find it, he stews over what would make it appear.

 

Loathing burrows in and out of his long-dead heart, widening its paths with every cycle.

* * *

 

 

After ensuring that the four are capable enough to handle this new stage, he leaves them to sleep.

 

He deafens his ears, closes his eyes, and shuts himself off to the world and beyond. He hollows himself out.

 

What he was once, full of only the goal, the ambition, was something he has lost the clarity of in the course of history. He has become padded with frivolities and idiosyncrasies. He speaks to himself at the core, asking –

 

_Why?_

 

His mind only delivers to him four figures shadowed in humanity.

 

He shakes himself brutally, dissolves them into disparate particles.

 

He asks – _What were you before?_

* * *

 

 

He wants to give himself over completely to this narcotic, but sobriety is thinking of how precarious his universe is at this moment, this spun-glass lever and fulcrum he once intended to move the world with.

 

He is long-familiar with failure, the oblivion that accompanies it, but now there are two unknowns – success and complacency – tugging at him like undertows on shores that are continents apart.

* * *

 

 

A million people with the same hand around their throats.

 

A million people looking over their shoulders, not knowing why.

 

A million people, ignorant of how, with each hitched breath as they pass a shadow in the alley, they only make the shadow grow larger.

* * *

 

 

They are chained to him, but he is chained to them, and they need only wrap their hands around the metal to bring him to his knees.


	4. Chapter 4

Daesung, in sleep, is almost the man he once was.

 

Seungri lays down beside him and watches his eyelids flutter in the shadow. Dried blood has collected at the corner of his mouth, and Seungri licks his thumb and reaches out to wipe it clean.

 

He expects it, the sudden tension stringing out a bare, tattooed arm that ends in a hand clamped tightly around his wrist. Long fingernails dig into his skin, but Seungri smiles in comfort, and it rustles up memories of sedative promises that relax Daesung's grip.

 

The off-hours are hardest, Seungri thinks, on Daesung. He remembers the softness in his face, the tears that gathered, trembling, at the precipice of his eyelashes. Even the thought of remembered fantasy violence turned his stomach then - and now the reality of it is a spur relentlessly digging into his side, compelling him into motion. Afterwards, he finds a satisfaction that is still alien to him, while he sits in hazy, home-grown guilt, while Seungri is reminiscing, Seunghyun is sated, and Youngbae is moving on.

 

His grip loosened, Seungri rubs his wetted thumb against the dried blood and, unafraid, drags the digit left over Daesung's lips.

 

While everyone else finds contentment, while everyone else can go out into the daylight and fit in the mosaic of humanity without detection, Daesung is left in solitude, his edges too sharp to fit.

 

His eyes are hooded and empty as Seungri looks into them.

 

There was once a _'before'_ , sharply delineated from the present in a line of bone and blood. Seungri misses nothing about it. He defines 'before' by hunger, discontent, and anger –

 

But perhaps, Daesung was happy.

 

Perhaps he was the only one with something to lose.

 

Seungri thinks that won't do, for there to be five wrapped up in the same destiny and only four at peace with it. He pushes himself across the floor to wrap himself beneath Daesung's arm. He can feel the tension return, how his forearm twitches in memory and newborn instinct, itching to hold his body tight, to squeeze the breath and blood out until he's empty.

 

He doesn't say a word as Daesung's arm pushes against his neck, where Seunghyun's discolorations still decorate his skin.

 

Shaky, urgent breathing dusts over Seungri's ear, and it wears the colors of a threat, but hides the soft heartbeat of a plea:

 

_"Leave."_

 

Seungri remembers breaking Daesung, and he thinks it's only right to give him the means to build himself back up.

 

He says, "No," and there's a demand in his refusal.

 

There are tears at the precipice once again, and they slide into Seungri's hair. He doesn't think he could hate anything more than this.

 

He pushes his head down and bites at the soft skin near Daesung's elbow, sharp and quick, teasing him with the promise of blood.

 

The breath, already heavy at the back of his neck, vibrates with a swallowed growl. The arm against his throat pulls tighter than a bowstring. Seungri's vision begins to bleed white, and he doesn't fight, doesn't protest. He instead offers himself up willingly to be the first act of violence Daesung does for his own pleasure.

 

The last thing he hears before passing out is Daesung, his bell-like laughter.

* * *

 

 

A sharp slap across the face wakes Seungri from his sleep with a start, as he instinctively kicks out at the worn blanket covering his legs. His surroundings are dark and poor, and the skin at his waist itches from the rough fabric.

 

In his drowsiness, the idea, that all of it, them, is a hallucination pours down his spine - but he looks up and sees Seunghyun, his hand at his side like a holster. Seunghyun is real, and Seungri uses him to re-ground.

 

He never would have dared to dream up Seunghyun.

 

Seunghyun looks pointedly at the juncture of his neck and shoulder, and in a moment finds bruises made there from smaller hands.

 

"Where is he?"

 

Placing one hand against the floor, Seungri pushes himself up to standing and rubs at the base of his skull. A headache lodges there, but Seunghyun's words prick at his skin and slingshot his focus forward.

 

Seunghyun finally pulls his eyes up from where they were memorizing various shades of purple against tan, and meet Seungri's, wide and questioning and off-balance.

 

They both know that Daesung doesn't leave on his own.

 

"Where did he go?" Seunghyun asks, his voice too calm, too careful.

 

Seungri can only shrug and wince as he passes by the older man. He avoids glancing at him; Seunghyun's gaze is a concrete weight that will hold him to the ground if given the opportunity. 

 

Fear is a more effective prison than any lock and key, Seungri thinks, and he unbarred Daesung against his will last night, pushing him out into freedom when he only wanted to pay penance. His mouth sets in a line, angled in concern in the shadows of pre-dawn, and his own fear is born anew and squawls against his ribcage.

 

Behind him, the curve of his spine and how it bends is measured in Seunghyun's calculating gaze, while Seungri shivers but bounds forward into the streets. He searches down alleys and looks into doorways, his voice light and high and pure as it calls out.

 

Seunghyun follows.

* * *

 

 

Drunk on liberation, Daesung met his victim only three corners out from where he had ducked out into the night on his own. A gasp stumbled out of their mouth, and Daesung swallowed the apprehension in it like water. They screamed, and screamed, and they haven't stopped screaming since. He's set out on a winding, turning path since then, but it's as though their body is lashed to his back, their wailing dripping out of a slack, blue mouth. 

 

It leeches away at his pleasure until he's left bone-dry.

 

He turns down what he thinks are unexplored corners, only to find recognition: where Seungri spoke so sweetly he can still hear the echoes in the brick; where he sees the outline of Youngbae sunk into the wall. He dodges ghosts that lob memories at him like grenades, and as happy consequence loses himself in a maze of back streets.

 

Weeds crawl up the walls here in a slow march of reclamation and he reaches out a hand, rubs a leaf between his fingers to reassure himself that there is still a whole world out there unsullied.

 

The screams are all in his head, he knows that - that, if anyone were to look at him, they'd see someone disturbed at silence, wincing and cringing at shadows, but they don't know what he knows: that silence is as much a threat as noise, and that shadows aren't content to wait.

 

The wind whispers to him underneath the dead's endless cry for mercy, and dangles a lure that would jump out of his range as soon as he dared to reach for it - it is that old fantasy of escape, to outrun all of mankind's routes and forge his own.

 

He's had that dream before. He remembers how it ends.

 

He thinks of the weeds instead: how they spring from the earth beneath foot after foot of brick and mortar; they crawl up walls in rich veins and slowly, inexorably, crush them.

 

If he just stood still enough, he's sure the earth would grant him the same favor and crush him into particles too small to hurt anyone.

 

He sees the width and breadth of that path: a seclusion that will test him time and time again. He also sees the end of the road and welcomes it.

 

He will, in the grip of the earth, be cleansed of his sins.

 

Dust begins to settle on his bare feet as he walks on. With each breath he assures the world that it will be over soon. He chants to himself, louder and louder – soon enough.

 

With each recitation, he turns his flight into a funeral procession.

 

Sunlight breaks into shards scattered across the rooftops in the pre-dawn chill.

* * *

 

 

Spilled blood calls out to Seunghyun in thick, congealed tones, and he gathers Seungri by the crook of the elbow to look down at the body. They search, up and down the street, to see where the next one is, and find nothing.

 

The streets are still mostly empty, with no trace of the adrenaline of fear that they expect. There can be no obscuring this body as it is - it lies at the mouth of the alley, dark and ugly as a cavity – and Seunghyun, with a practiced motion, hooks his arms beneath the limp arms and hauls it deeper in.

 

The movement of it causes the head to fall back against him, marbled, blank eyes trying to find his, but he is instead examining critically the crushed paper that was once a throat, red ink spilt and splattered in its crevices.

 

Seunghyun finds the restraint inexplicable and wipes his hand across his brow, darkening it carelessly.  

 

He looks to Seungri and raises one thick eyebrow in a silent suggestion.

 

The boy shakes his head in rejection in a one-two beat, before abandoning the motion; he runs his hand through his hair as a stop, turning his back to Seunghyun. His frustrated stare lands on the metal, the concrete, the cracks of the sidewalk, leaving Seunghyun to make the call.

 

The cool, slow breath Seunghyun lets out in one moment is inhaled by the man in red in the next.

 

Seunghyun expects foreknowledge, especially about this - that the man in red has been watching this catastrophe unravel and waiting for one of them to give in and explicitly ask for him, for his guidance, but the man in red searches Seunghyun, and surprise skitters across his face, quick as a cockroach.

 

The minuscule expression, there one moment and gone the next, shifts Seunghyun; gravity stutters, mistrust squeezes its bloated body between his ribs and flattens his lungs against its weight.

 

Wildly, he thinks that the man in red has to notice this, this tailspin of doubt threatening to uproot him, but either apathy or ignorance is directing the other man, who brushes past Seunghyun to reel Seungri back in - he holds one hand on Seungri's shoulders, his light fingers mapping the purple and blue blossoms on his skin. 

 

 _For all of eternity_ , Seunghyun will think. He will think of sliding his knife between butterfly-delicate shoulderblades; he will think of hanging the man in red on a hook and watching his feet kick out in futility. He will think of the feel of his organs, how they will be exactly like any other man's, wet and slippery in his hands as he frees them from his body.

 

He thinks, he _will_ think, from this moment on, of murder and violence and pain and punishment and retribution, scarlet-hued and ripe for action, but the man in red doesn't so much as twitch as he turns to face Seunghyun.

 

He breathes in and breathes out and says nothing.

 

The man in red walks, briskly down the street behind them, Seungri solemn in his shadow, and Seunghyun falls into line behind them.

 

He thinks of shallow, long cuts, and how, when they reach the end of this journey, Daesung's fingers could tear the man apart at his seams.

* * *

 

 

The earth and all that is in it is nothing to the man in red. He could twist himself through the air, find Daesung between breaths, and end this in an instant. He knows his errant boy would even welcome it.

 

But: he has known rejection before, the sour taste of it in his mouth, and this is different, intimate and magnificent in its betrayal. It is sandpaper beneath his skin and blisters bursting in the cradle of his joints. The dissonance beats behind his eyes like a war drum, and all of it constricts his vision. All he can see is what he has allowed to happen. He paved the road for his own failure, and hung himself with a rope he spun with his own hands. He was tempted and seduced and he is now a fool for wanting to be wanted.

 

Seunghyun and Seungri are silent waves lapping in his wake. Youngbae, always so close, burns at the nape of his neck.

 

If he is manacled to them, then they are manacled to him, and he curls his hand into a fist and pulls on an unearthly chain.

* * *

 

 

Daesung chokes, Daesung falls. His fingers scrabble at his neck as he strains to breathe, but the ground reaches up for him greedily. Galaxies spin in his vision as unconsciousness claims him.

 

And it is curious, concerned eyes that land on his sweat-streaked back. It is a compassionate, human hand that reaches tentatively to help.

* * *

 

 

As they march along, a dark, pleased smile scars the man in red's face, and Seungri shudders to see it.

* * *

 

 

It is the smell of breakfast, the whistle of a tea kettle, and the crackle of an ancient radio working in concert that wakes Daesung. The sun streaming through the old, clean curtains has a high angle to its slant. It catches the dust Daesung sends streaming into the air as he throws the blanket off of him and swings his legs over to the floor. The bed beneath him is soft and worn and it lets out a series of elderly creaks at his sudden motion.

 

There's someone shuffling outside of the room, hidden from sight from the near-closed door. Their feet slide against tile in well-practiced steps.

 

Daesung curls his toes into the carpet and his muscles tense and tighten.

 

"Ah, awake in there?" a warm voice calls to him.

 

His jaw works noiselessly, whatever response was possible swept away in the swell of the simple courtesy in that question. The door swings open, revealing his host: the man offers a smile that exposes all the wrinkles and lines in his face, the natural harvest of time, but all Daesung sees is the old, long-healed scar, unnatural and sharp as it parallels the line of his jaw.

 

All of his memories from the past months are held together at the hinge of one moment of weakness, when Daesung imagined how he could create such a scar with his own hands. It was an idle and passing thought, with no actualization: the moments after, the days and nights following, the months since, he has had things more terrible than that done to him and he, in turn, doled out even more to others. Yet that was the first push from his dreams to his reality, a trickle that became a stream that became a flood.

 

His hands were clean, then. He had trimmed his nails short in the warm comfort of a modest apartment, and swept the clippings into a bin.

 

Now, his hands curl inward and tighten; his knuckles are rubbed raw.

 

The old man smiles and takes the seat across from him, pressing tea towards Daesung's closed fist.

* * *

 

 

At the bottom of the man in red's throat, a pool of copper slowly begins to boil.

* * *

 

 

Gentle, understanding fingers rest on the back of Daesung's hand when he fails to take the proffered cup. He relents and opens it, and nods a jerky thanks. He taps his fingers against the ceramic in a hurried half-beat and swallows the saliva gathering like a summons at the back of his mouth.

 

He brings the cup to his lips and drinks. It is too hot, and he is grateful for the burn.

 

The old man keeps trying to look him in the eyes, but Daesung looks down, instead. He flexes his bare toes and inhales the sweet steam rising from the tea.

 

The hand of a clock moves too slowly in the next room.

 

The man clears his throat, and asks, "Do you need help?"

 

Two cliffs rise up in Daesung's mind and collide with each other in a race to the top, to be the first tripped off his tongue. They are both affirmatives.

 

 _Yes_ , says one. It says nothing else, it is a starving beast, far wandered afield.

 

 _Yes_ , says the other. It is a beast, too, and it is begging to be put down.

* * *

 

 

The man in red breathes deeply and runs his fingers along the walls. The weeds scorch beneath his fingertips; they leave pencil-thin ash marks on the walls.

 

 _Here_ , the soil – he can feel Daesung's intentions where he fell, where his hopes seeped out of him like sweat. The man in red knows the weakness of the human heart and tracks it like a bloodhound. He follows that trail faithfully.

 

 _Here_ , a door.

 

He throws out an arm and beckons his followers forward.

* * *

 

 

Seungri walks slowly forward and lays his hands on the door. He looks back over his shoulder; in the glance, he catches Seunghyun standing at his side, facing away from the man in red, his jaw a taut wire. The man in red grins at Seungri and bares blood-stained teeth.

 

"Wait," he commands, and the vibration of his voice is demanding and persistent and physical for the first time. "Watch."

 

Seungri remembers Daesung's arms around him, fragile in their strength.

* * *

 

 

Daesung hasn't moved, while the old man sits on his question patiently. Two great continents are at war within him while his tea cools in his hand.

 

In the corner of his eyes, shadows in familiar outlines walk through off-white walls and gather behind his host. Daesung squeezes his eyes shut and brings the cup of tea to his lips and it is perfect, body-warm and thick and metallic in his mouth.

 

The cup crashes to floor, the old man gasps, and blood drops like dew on their feet.

 

Daesung's body begins to shake as the shadows pull at his hair, scratch long wounds down his arms, and howl destruction in his ears.

* * *

 

 

Outside, the man in red is a vision of wrath: the air around him crackles and twists, trying to escape his presence.

* * *

 

 

Daesung's hand reaches out, trembling, beckoning, and now the old man hesitates, eyes flickering back and forth, fear at last breaching his heart.

 

Suddenly unhesitating fingers grasp at this skull, hold him hostage as a long, sharp nail finds the line of his familiar scar. It lingers there for a moment, and then the fingers tighten and pull and rip his jaw apart.

 

Blood gushes out of the gaping, ugly hole that was a kind, gentle mouth.

* * *

 

 

There's a howl, broken and keening and mournful, and Seungri hears the glass crack behind him at its force.

 

He meets the man in red's victorious, ruthless eyes and says, "Stop."

 

In the same moment, as the glass splinters, Seunghyun throws the door open and walks into the flood of noise.

 

The man in red's smile turns to Seungri as he tilts his head, contemplative and cold.

* * *

 

 

Daesung sits, Indian-style, the broken cup of the old man's skull cradled in his lap as Seunghyun approaches him.

 

Seunghyun doesn't reel as Daesung looks up at him. He arranges the man's legs out of the way, shoving the torso aside to free space on the floor. He sits, he pulls out his blade, and he holds it between the two of them for examination, twisting it back and forth. Daesung looks at the weapon and looks at his hands, where gristle webs between his fingers.

 

"Do you want to die?" Seunghyun asks. He adjusts the grip, bringing it to the ready. "Do you want me to kill you now?"

 

Daesung swallows and tries to re-capture what he had pictured for the easy resolution, the quiet escape into the earth, but the vision dances away from him, now and forever out of his grasp.

 

He resigns himself to existence.

 

"No."

 

Seunghyun's eyes sharpen and he leans forward, flicks the knife end over end and holds the handle out to Daesung.

 

"Seungri wanted to let you go," he says. His words leap from an impossible height and dive into Daesung's chest, knocking the wind from him. Seunghyun takes it in, and moves closer. His eyes don't waver.

 

"He doesn't have the stomach for this. Life is easy to end. The way he does it, easiest of all. All of it, talk. And it was sweet, the way he made you feel. That's the way he made all of them feel. You were nothing special until _he_ told Seungri you were. You were going to die in that room as soon as you let Seungri talk to you. It was _him_ ," Seunghyun's lips rolled around that word like tobacco. "He wanted to keep you."

 

"We didn't know what for. He told us to throw you in there and leave, let him do the work. But you screamed so much – Seungri never had to hear screams for that long. I don't draw it out. He started leaving every night as soon as you started. I only saw him when _he_ pulled him back in."

 

Daesung starts at how Seunghyun has come so close to him without noticing, how his hand is closed over his, where their fingers are tangled in the same hair. Seunghyun's voice drops.

 

"Right before they marked you, he told me. He was going to let you out. He was going to take this," Seunghyun turned the knife up, the point quivering between their faces. "And cut your throat."

 

"Now," Seunghyun grabs Daesung by the chin and pushes the leaf-edge of the blade against his skin. "What are you going to do about it?"

* * *

 

 

The man in red strides towards Seungri. Paralyzing panic sets in his limbs, screaming hopelessness at him, as though he is trying to outrun an avalanche.

 

"You don't tell me what to do," the man in red growls. He circles Seungri, looking him up and down, his gaze a cinder held square against the skin.

 

"You have no right," he says as he comes around to look him in the eyes, to hold him accountable at last.

 

Seungri opens his lips to say something, anything – to protest, to swear, to lie – but his tongue is powerless. It sits, a useless, choking weight in his mouth. Sand coats the tunnel of his throat as he tries to swallow the sudden failure of his words.

 

The man in red hums and pulls at his own ear, furrows his brow in a question.

 

"What was that?" he asks.

 

There is no salvation at hand, Seungri realizes. His existence, his world, is collapsing at its center and he wants to taste everything before it's too late.

 

He surges forward, wraps his hands around the soft, child-like cheeks of the man in red, and kisses him.

* * *

 

 

The sensation scorches Seungri, leaving every inch of him raw and writhing, but he can't bring himself to pull away. He grabs at the man in red's hands and dwarfs them in his own.

 

He holds and holds and it only feels like the world is collapsing even faster.

* * *

 

 

There is no beast, no monster stirring within Daesung as he puts the corpse aside and stands up beside Seunghyun. He stretches to his full height and stands up straight. He wipes his hands on his pants and feels no wild urge, no frantic call dragging him forward.

 

This desire is all his own, genuinely human, and it is to see his creator destroyed.

* * *

 

 

Before all of this –

 

– before Youngbae,

 

– before Daesung,

 

– before Seunghyun,

 

– before Seungri – the man in red was alone.

 

He was alone, and it's this thought that makes him relent and become pliant, long enough for Seunghyun to pull Seungri away, the silver of his knife stark against his throat; long enough for Daesung to embrace the man in red from behind, put his hands beneath his jaw, and twist his neck until it snaps.

* * *

 

 

Everything is in ruins.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Uh, sorry...
> 
> To be fair, I did tag for it.


	5. Chapter 5

Youngbae finds the body of the man in red at noon, and weeps while a crowd gathers around them. They shuffle forward and back, uncertain at the scene, at the shattered glass still sparkling in the sun, the disfigured body in the street, neck at an unnatural angle, beautiful like a sculpture, and the body in the house, mutilated and abandoned.

 

Youngbae cares about none of their concerns. He is without a center, stability as unreachable as the sky.

 

When another man – closest, boldest, stupidest – tries to stop him as he gathers up the body in his arms, Youngbae holds him by the throat until his skin blackens and cracks in his grip and his gasps turn to ash.

 

The crowd disperses in terror.

 

Youngbae holds the man in red in his arms and goes home to mourn.

* * *

 

 

Seunghyun put the knife away as soon as the man in red's body dropped to the ground. Seungri stood there, looking down at the scene. Disbelief was the first emotion – strong and confident – and then doubt grappled with it as Daesung and Seunghyun began to walk away without reprisal. When they reached the corner, Seunghyun turned to look at Seungri, rooted to the spot where he had released him.

 

He had nothing to do but follow.

 

Seunghyun puts the three of them in a hotel room, and washes Daesung's hands clean until the basin of the sink is coated red. Seungri sits on the bed and feels complicit, how he, by telling the man in red to stop, allowed Seunghyun to run in to Daesung – and to persuade him to do this.

 

How he held him steady for the slaughter.

 

He remembers how Daesung hated himself, every time, but there's no sign of it now, no regret sagging his shoulders, no sorrow in his eyes. He is the calmest Seungri has ever seen him, and it is wrong, wrong, for it to only come at the cost of the man in red's life.

 

They both leave the sink, and Daesung wipes his hands on the snow-white towels, coloring it a shy, pale pink, before sitting down beside Seungri and laying his head on his shoulder.

 

The world, held frozen in its dissolution when the life left the man in red's eyes, begins to slowly crumble again.

 

Daesung's hand pushes against his chest, and Seungri falls onto the bed.

 

Daesung's legs straddle his waist, and Seungri looks up at the ceiling, mute.

 

Daesung's hands reach down, and Seungri winces, squeezing his eyes shut too slowly to not see the light in Daesung's flicker and dim as he only feels gentle fingers lay at the hollow of his collarbones.

 

He wanted this a lifetime ago – he wants it still – but now it's all cruel irony, to have it within reach while he's cracked open, vulnerable and tender and craving and fearing touch in equal measures. He fears for someone just like him to burst in on this moment, to hold his heart and hand it over for Seunghyun to slice apart.

 

He isn't brave enough to lift his hands, to open his eyes, to speak, but he tilts his head back and that will have to be enough to count as courage.

 

When Daesung leans down and presses his lips to his, it's soft and kind and Seungri is grateful, because he is drowning in an inch of water. His breath thins out under the delicate pressure to this imposition, Daesung kissing him.

 

The last time they were this close, Seungri made demands, and Daesung gave in, and the reward was brief and pained and shadowed by consequences.

 

When Daesung tells him to stay, now, the word squeezes into the narrow gap between their bodies and promises a long life and pleasure and freedom. He stays; he lets his body be towed forward at whatever pace is given. He moves only to give Daesung more access, at his back, his chest, his legs, his mouth, sliding himself open for whatever he chooses to do, and the other boy takes it, slowly enjoying what's being given to him.

 

He pulls Seungri firmly onto his lap and maps the planes and curves of his body with his hands and mouth. His breath is hot against Daesung's ear as his tongue samples the sweat dotting his shoulder, and his fingers work at loosening his clothing, and Seungri feels like a supplicant, come to beg for a scrap and instead finding a place at the table laid out just for him.

 

Hands slide from Seungri's waist to his back, and down, gripping him firmly and lifting him up, loose-limbed while his clothes fall away from his body. He finds himself back on Daesung's lap and he is pulled flush against him, his silence finally broken in a moan as Daesung wraps his hand around him.

 

Seunghyun's weight settles on the far end of the bed, and Seungri's fogged mind remembers the first primal temptation of his presence: the novelty of darkness, coupled with a painful warmth that lived in his chest and slowly consumed him until it was snuffed out.

 

The thought cuts sharp like a razor, that he never knew what could have been with him and Seunghyun because of the man in red's jealousy.

 

And the man in red is dead.

 

His dormant ambitions explode in his chest like a firework, undimmed and uncontained.

 

He pants in Daesung's ear, " _We're alive_ ," and the other boy hums in approval and happiness against his chest.

 

He groans and twists so that they fall, sideways, against Seunghyun's long, long legs and pulls his head back so that he can look into Daesung's eyes. They are dark with want and Seungri drinks it in as much as he can without crashing back down, and then he looks up to Seunghyun, hoping he sees how his gaze holds the overflow of both of their hearts.

 

He speaks again, trembling as much from Daesung licking a long strip from his sternum to under his chin as he is from holding Seunghyun's gaze longer than he could ever bear:

 

" _We're alive_."

 

Seunghyun's returning smile is winter, cold and harsh and beautiful, but it's theirs: Seungri's and Daesung's. They will share it with no one.

 

He reaches out and strokes his thumb against Seungri's jawline until it catches on parted lips, and he hooks it beneath his teeth and pulls it down. Where Daesung lies beneath him, Seunghyun guides Seungri to re-focus his attention there; his other hand rests on the back of Seungri's head and presses down until their lips reunite, and Seunghyun looks on as they find their place against his lap.

 

Daesung's hand returns to the pace it kept before, and Seungri lets his head fall down, and his tongue finds the raised skin where Seungri had drawn ink to hide knife wounds. He atones for it; he kisses the scar feather-light, and Seunghyun strokes his hair, and Daesung slides his thumb against the head of his cock.

* * *

 

 

Alone, Youngbae sets the body of the man in red down, and tries to ignore the desperate hands that shake at this useless proximity. His only source of relief in this world is gone without notice, and the blue tinge that is edging into the man in red's lips is so wrong Youngbae vomits.

 

His face is a gravestone, a memorial to something that was meant to be eternal, and Youngbae sits on the floor next to the pool and stares into it for hours, trying to find meaning.

 

When he falls asleep, huddled against the floor, he dreams of running, again, except now it only takes him further and further away from the man in red. 

 

When he wakes up, he crawls over to the foot of the body, and doesn't look up. He ducks his head beneath stiff fingers, and rocks back and forth, and pretends that they are dragging through his hair in comfort.

* * *

 

 

The days and nights don't come as easily as they used to for the three of them. They each now have to uncover who they are, the defining story of their lives ripped out. They find they have to define themselves by each other and try to create a new context.

 

But when Seungri tries to speak like he did before, and Seunghyun and Daesung are waiting on him, the failure isn't due to paranoia, or fear, or suspicion. The failure is in him; his words are heavy and patently false. He can only bring to the table those eager to swallow lies, and the satisfaction they bring is fleeting.

 

Seunghyun's cuts are strong, but start to lack precision. He misses the mark, draws out the suffering unintentionally, and his frustration mounts. The suffering becomes intentional, as he turns the cuts shallow and wild, and Daesung intervenes, kissing Seunghyun's mouth, then his knife, and finishing what he started.

 

Daesung breathes in deeply and sometimes he slides his weight from foot to foot as he and Seunghyun wait: it takes both Seungri and Seunghyun to wind him up and to bring him back down. It is time-consuming and intensive, but each morning they come home and his head is clear, his eyes dry, and his satisfaction does not cost his sanity.

 

It is worth it, but they ostentatiously make a show of not mentioning what brought them together, or what they are missing. Each one is guilty of seeing Youngbae in every shadowed embrace, or hearing him in every eavesdropped moan.

 

None of them wear red.

 

The work that they do is small and it is done only to satisfy, to survive. There are no goals bigger than their bones and bodies.

 

It is worth it, they say in the darkness, to remind each other; it is enough, they say against each other's skin, to survive.

 

They all swallow the lie simultaneously, and it is bitter in their throats.

* * *

 

 

Youngbae's heart is whittled down, day by day, as the man in red decays in front of him.

 

He goes out each day and tries to remain who the man in red made him to be. He loves and loses them, but the stolen desire rots in his veins when it goes nowhere, when he takes the man in red by the hand and it only breaks in his grip. 

 

It's only when his grief has shrunken his heart paper-thin that he remembers the other three.

 

They were only ever shadows of the man in red, but they were his, and they carry the weight of his existence in their bones.

 

The beat of his heart is weak, but it remains as long as they do.

* * *

 

 

They started later than normal, indulging in each other too long, and it's making Daesung more restless. The now-customary process of bringing him up - moving against him, sucking against his skin, and Seunghyun's voice reminding him how they are together, now, and how together they are enough - has brought him past the point of accepting what's coming, and instead hungering for it.

 

He brushes the moth-eaten curtain out of the window and spies Seungri, smile on his face, laughter on his lips, wrapping his hand around the forearm of a woman who only shakes him off, who leaves Seungri's smile and laughter to die in her wake.

 

When he turns, his hand reaching up to rub the back of his neck in frustration, he sees Daesung, and his lips turn thin and apologetic.

 

A snarl half-forms in his throat, but he muffles it as Seunghyun crowds behind him and buries his mouth at the crown of his head and he joins to watch Seungri.

 

His sigh is all that Daesung needs to hear to quell his heart, at least temporarily, to know that his frustration is shared. He is stupid to think otherwise, when the slope of Seungri's back is tense, and Seunghyun traces his knife against his own skin.

 

"Go outside," Seunghyun says after he breathes in and out a few times, Daesung's hair catching in his lips. "There's no one there."

 

He turns around and catches Seunghyun in a kiss, gratitude at his keeping watch. The taller man accepts it for a moment before pushing him towards the door. He keeps his back to Daesung, his profile sharp and straight in the light of the window.

 

Daesung can't help but look back at him, even as he walks out into the night air, and he doesn't see Youngbae until it's too late.

 

He reeks of death, of sorrow. He reeks of desire.

* * *

 

 

Youngbae pushes against the startled boy, lays his skin against his completely to compensate for how this is just a remnant, but however small, the man in red is still here, in Daesung. He can feel it in how his heart trips to beat faster and faster, how want is stretching out thin fingers to feel more, to take more to satisfy his long-starved appetite.

 

Daesung gasps in his grip, and Youngbae can feel how it's uncurling parts of him that have been lying rigid, and his mind goes giddy in this relief.

 

He wraps his fingers around Daesung and pulls him closer, so that their hips are flush with each other, and kisses him hard, urgently, slides his tongue into his mouth so he can find everything that's been left over.

 

The experience is too brief, too little, when Daesung pushes him away. When Youngbae moves forward again, the other man grabs him by his shoulder to hold him still, and he touches the three-pronged scar there, and flinches when his fingers slide against their old path.

* * *

 

 

Seunghyun gapes at the sight, when Daesung drags in their fourth. He raps his fingers on the window without looking and gestures for Seungri to come inside.

 

He wrinkles his nose. Youngbae looks terrible, ragged and unwashed, but he smells like a corpse.

 

None of that seems to be occurring to him, though, as he tries to trail after Daesung when he goes to Seunghyun's side, and only stops at Seunghyun's expression. He seems wounded, desperate, and looks at the two of them like salvation.

 

When Seungri passes by him, his arm brushing against his, his body is racked with shudders, and he lets out a whine and begs, " _Please_."

 

The three of them exchange looks, and in them each holds their own memory of what it was to be hungry and without purpose.

 

It is Seungri that holds out his hand first, oldest and youngest at the same time, and Youngbae clasps to it like a life preserver.

* * *

 

 

Seungri asks it, as they lie in bed the next day. His head rests against Daesung's stomach, his legs are thrown across Seunghyun's. Youngbae looks at him from the foot of the bed, where he has been staring at them like they'll disappear if he so much as blinks.

 

He never looked at them like that before. His only fixation was the man in red, and the rest were inconsequential in his orbit.

 

"Why did you find us?"

 

Youngbae looks surprised, as though the question needed to even be asked. His silence is prolonged, and Daesung nudges Seunghyun as they both realign their attention to the exchange.

 

He clears his throat and tries not to picture where the man in red is now, how his skin has flaked off, how his tongue has by now dissolved in his mouth.

 

"Because of _him_."

 

The statement is a catapult, slinging the tension in the room to an impossible height, and Youngbae remembers every single victim as Seunghyun leans forward.

 

"He's dead," he says, and Daesung bites at his lip, drawing blood.

 

Youngbae nods.

 

"He is, but you aren't."

 

Seungri blinks, and his hand crawls to his chest unthinkingly, laying over his heart. Daesung holds out his arms and looks at the tattoos there like they will rear back and sink fangs into his skin.

 

Youngbae pushes on as Seunghyun's face becomes a hard, inexpressive mask.

 

" _Here_ ," he says, as he places his hand against Seunghyun's cheek. "I can still feel him here."

 

He moves up on the bed and sits on his knees in front of Seungri. He pulls his hand away from his chest and puts his own there, and he can feel the ash swirling in the cavern behind his ribs.

 

"Here," he says, and he turns to Daesung, last of all. He turns his back to him and pulls his shirt up and over his head, so that the long marks cutting his back in half are exposed. Cold, shaking fingers brush against it, and he breathes out, " _There_."

* * *

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The man in red had always thought that death was a matter of perspective.

 

 

 

Abandoned, decayed, he shrieks back into awareness; in this single moment of violent gravity, he now knows it to be true.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you very, very much for reading! Comments and feedback are very welcome, as I am quite new to writing Big Bang fic.


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